DRVPereira

Probably there's no point in writing a review more than a year after the release date, but I felt the need to write about one of my favorite games of this generation, as I only created my Metacritic account a couple of months ago. There are many things which may be listed as reasons for liking this game: the story, the gameplay, the difficulty and the multiplayer, for instance. Although it may not appear, Dark Souls has a great, dense story, which is not told directly to the player. You must go after the elements that explain the story and the world of the game, reading the description of items and talking to every NPC that you'll encounter. The story is so rich that you'll even may find many videos on YouTube dedicated to explaining Dark Souls lore. The gameplay is awesome: the controls are very simple, yet extremely effective. The difficulty is just about right: the game is hard. It does not allow mistakes, you'll die many times and you'll die dozens of times more if you don't learn from your mistakes. But there's no reason in being hard just to be hard. There's also an amazing feeling of compensation when you can finally beat a challenging enemy. It's hard, but also very rewarding. The multiplayer is probably the most original that I've ever seen. You can interact with other players in many ways, such as PvP, cooperative gameplay, or just leaving messages on the ground to help (or confuse) others. I've played over 120 hours and I'm on the first third of my third playthrough.

As a person who played the original version of Shadow of the Colossus on the PS2, I must say that I was expecting very much of this HD version. I haven't played ICO yet, but unfortunately, my experience until now was kind of a disappointment. The controls are terrible! The camera... WTF are those camera controls? I don't remember those kind of problems in the original version. And also, the graphics are bad, comparing to other HD versions of old games I played, like Okami HD (PS3) and Metal Gear Solid (Xbox 360). Don't get me wrong here, I like these games a lot, but I think that maybe the conversion to PS3 and HD was not well done.

Gorgeous graphics, beautiful colors, great story, the best conversion of game to HD that I've ever seen. The fact that the dialogs are just some babbling with subtitles can be annoying sometimes, but it's just a minor detail that won't spoil an awesome gaming experience.

Artorias of the Abyss is great a DLC. The new areas are interesting and the bosses are really challenging. Although I'm not a PvP person, I enjoyed the new PvP arena too. The only flaw in my opinion is the lack of new achievements.